


day's eye

by leradny



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Blindness, Character Study, Everybody Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, very light romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2018-12-25 20:30:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12043698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leradny/pseuds/leradny
Summary: Everybody lives, but Jyn is blind from looking straight into the light of the Death Star. Short chapters, mostly.





	1. Chapter 1

The light grows and grows and grows.

Jyn's eyes water, but with Cassian’s arms around her she keeps them open, unafraid and fascinated, in a strange way. This was her father’s work. He’d killed their whole family, thousands of innocent people. But she still loves him. She doesn't have the strength to be angry. They'd done their job, her and Cassian, and she could spend it raging at the unfairness of everything, but all that's left is a small voice like her mother's that says hope. Not for herself, but for the Resistance. The galaxy.

The galaxy that goes white around them and she knows nothing after that.

\- - -

When she wakes it is dark and still. Her injuries are still there, a quiet ache, but then she breathes in and awakens a inescapable burn in her lungs. It feels like when she’d gotten pneumonia once, in the terrible years after Saw’s abandonment. Except now, her face and hands are plastered with bacta patches. Underneath the spat of coughing, someone shifts beside her.

"Little sister."

"Baze," she croaks, relieved. She hardly recognizes her own voice. Struggling to sit up in the dark, she's stopped by Bane’s giant hand on her shoulder.

"Stay down, Jyn."

"I’m fine." She was well enough to carry Cassian, the last she remembered--carry him all the way to the beach before he collapsed. Remembering that brings back her desperation. "Where's--"

"No, you're not."

"Please--" She says as her heart beats a frantic tattoo of _CassianCassianCassian_ and the monitor quickens in response. “Just turn the lights on.” She's already thought him dead once and without the adrenaline of a fight she can’t take another. They were supposed to die  _together_ , had every expectation of it, she was almost at peace with it--and now where is he? If he's dead, she is too, she can't go on without him--

"Your heart, Jyn. Be calm. The lights are on."

She cautiously blinks, moving her head up and down. Opening her eyes as wide as possible. Wincing as she stretches the bandages. “I can’t see anything,” she rasps, and her breath rattles in and out. "Where's--" Her cough comes out wet and an alarm sounds. "Where's--"

"Jyn?" The voice is rougher like hers, but with a familiar cadence. She holds her breath because that's the only way to stop coughing. From her left the voice goes on, "Jyn, it’s me."

She reaches out in the darkness with one bandaged hand to meet Cassian halfway. And his grip is the same as she remembered, tight enough to hurt through the layers of bandages and bacta, but she doesn't care, not at all. Cassian loosens his hold. Jyn fumbles with her other hand and despite her aching chest and the burn starting to work its way through her skin, she buries her head in his shoulder the way they were on the beach in Scarif.

His head's been shaved, she notices at a distance, as her wrist brushes against a bare neck and scalp. But still. Still. It's Cassian. She knows him now, in life or death or in the dark. She can breathe.

The monitor slows.


	2. a lie, all of it

Waking up blind is a bit like waking up at night. The beep of her monitor swims into her ears, and for the first few moments Jyn runs entirely on one of Saw's lessons hammered into her mind: _If you cannot see, use your other senses until you can. The enemy already knows where you are._

Except here there is no enemy--as far as her senses can tell.

Her senses tell her: There is a cold tube down her throat and her throat works against it. She grimaces. Scrunches her fingers to finds her hands still bandaged, but a snatch of exposed skin at her wrist reveals the warm clean sheets of the medical bed. Her eyes--she can't close them and feels the sliminess of bacta-soaked bandages packed around them. Her head has been shaved--yes, she remembers that, the coolness was strange. A needle and tube lie cold against her skin.

Everywhere else burns. On the inside she burns like she did on Scarif.

She's suddenly so thirsty she can't bear it and the beep of her heart monitor quickens.

"Miss Erso."

An unfamiliar woman's voice speaks. An unfamiliar hand settles on her shoulder, warm but firm--comforting while keeping her still. It's the same sort of touch Saw had, if less rough. Jyn breathes through the tube, slowly, and her heartbeat follows.

"I am Mosima. You have had an infection in your lungs for the past four days. The tube is for air. You nearly drowned from the inside. Most of the bandaging is for the burns you suffered on Scarif. You're also running a fever. But otherwise, you're reasonably stable. I'll be leaving you here for only a moment--I need to find an assistant."

Jyn is grateful that she can't see when Mosima returns with her assistant. The whole operation of pulling a tube out of her throat feels _disgusting_. And Jyn has plenty of comparisons to make. She once had to run after Saw's troupe for three miles with a rusty knife in her arm.

Once the awful, awful tube is out, her lungs feel exactly as her arm did, soiled and battered. She starts hacking up... something, and evidently the medics were prepared for this. Someone guides her head and shoulders over a pan of some sort to wait out the fit. Then they remove the bandages over her eyes and Jyn hopes for a desperate moment that something will change in the blank nothingness of her vision. Even a little.

Nothing does. Underneath the cold bacta her eyes feel as if they've been taped open and sanded bloody.

"Can you speak?" Mosima asks.

Jyn refuses to think about anything else. "Y--y--" One more massive cough and her chest settles. "I think so." Her voice is there, if weak and whispery. Her heart speeds, feverish, and they strap on a breathing mask with vapor hissing out of it. It smells like bacta. She's had quite enough of slime, but she's hardly in any position to refuse.

"How do you feel, Miss Erso?"

A question for the ages. "In pain." She tries to speak clearly through the breathing mask and her throat. "Lots of it."

"Are your hands numb?"

"No."

"Can you still feel all of your face?"

"I can feel pain all over my face."

"Oh, good," Mosima says. After an awkward pause, she goes on, "I meant to say that it looks like there's no nerve damage. You only have second degree burns."

"Second degree burns from what?" Jyn asks.

"The steam. Most of the water on Scarif was vaporized in the attack and you were right on the beach when it happened. Your respiratory system is very badly off at the moment, but like your burns it should just be a matter of time. You'll be healed in about a month, as long as you don't leave this bed."

Jyn doesn't know if she can do that.

"We're giving you the necessary medications--including a sedative if necessary--and nutrients through the drip in your arm."

Jyn feels at the inside of her elbow with the patch of bare skin at her wrist. Sure enough, there's a needle taped down. She carefully lifts her hand and places it back by her side.

"Can you see anything?"

"No."

"Well." A brief pause. Jyn wishes she could see their faces, but therein lies the problem. When Mosima speaks again, she sounds perfectly calm. She sounds rehearsed. "You were exposed to the light of the explosion first-hand."

"What about Cassian?"

"He couldn't see anything when he awoke either, but he's starting to see light and shadow." A calm hand on her shoulder. "Yours may be temporary too."

Lying in the med-bay after everyone has left for their own treatment, Jyn opens her eyes wide and still sees nothing. If it is dark, her eyes don't adjust. Even in that hole in the ground with her mother's dying lamp, waiting for Saw Guerrera, she could still see something.

"Temporary," she whispers as the door clicks shut.

In moments she's trying not to cry.

Blindness is the least of her problems compared to her half-burnt body and infected lungs. Blind people can get along just fine. Chirrut is the most recent example, but she's seen plenty of other beings who worked just fine without eyes. It's not the dark Jyn hates, anyway, it's the memories. Saw's death, her father's death, her mother, all those people on Scarif, Cassian's fall. She used to stop bad memories by focusing on what was in front of her and now that option is gone. She can't spar with anyone to wear herself out. How can she escape from them? All her terrible thoughts will ambush her in this bed and she can do _nothing._

But then, wonder of wonders, the sedative kicks in. She drifts into the sleep of the drugged and thinks of names. Bodhi. Chirrut. Baze. Cassian.

Papa. Mama.

She wonders where her mother's crystal is.


End file.
